Big surprise showed up on the DVD player last night.

Little side note.  For those you who have read my Blockbuster rant, I appear to be hijacking Google searches for “Blockbuster Blue Ticket”.

None the less, this one doesn’t really involve my pending to be estranged relationship with the candy, popcorn, and soda combo whores.  Instead, the surprise appeared in the pilot episode of The Big Bang Theory.

It would seem, ladies and gentlemen, that even though this show is on in syndication about 100 hours a week (I bet that’s a pretty darn good guess), elements of the compound still feel compelled to purchase entire seasons of the show on DVD.  Last night, such a purchase took place and our drawer full of stuff we watch on occasion received a new neighbor in the presence of The Big Bang Theory, Season 1.

Isn’t that wonderful?

For reasons unknown, we started watching the DVD last night and ran across a surprise.  The episode opened with two of it’s characters sitting in a sperm bank pondering a donation.  The motivation was to pick up some extra cash in order to get faster internet speeds in the apartment.  Even though I had seen the pilot several times in syndication, this part of the episode had always been edited out.

Go figure.

Now let’s move on to the edited version of today’s smattering of verbal brilliance.

Are you familiar with “Leave it”?

Don’t bother answering.  By the time you’re done reading today’s dispatch, you’ll have a pretty darn good understanding of the practice.

“Leave it” is a command that Hope learned in obedience training.  The premise is that when she approaches something she’s not to approach, we say “Leave it” to her in a very firm voice.  She subsequently stops her approach and looks us in the eye.  We subsequently praise her verbally for following instructions.

It works quite well on Hope on a variety of stuff she may want to eat, chew on, trash talk, etc.

Training a dog to respond correctly to “Leave it” culminates into a battle of wills between you and the dog.  The first thing you want to do is to leash the dog to a door knob or something that will keep Fido from going too far.  Once your dog is at the end of their leash, you sit on the floor and put a treat on the floor just out of the pooch’s reach.  Stay there with the treat, and every time the dog makes a move for the treat, you say “Leave it”.  When the dog gives up on the treat and looks at you with the WTF look in their eye, you praise them and give them a treat that you have in your hand.

Do not give the dog the treat that’s on the floor.  That’s the one they’ve been told to leave alone, and it will confuse them if you give it up.

So what if the dog manages to get the treat you’ve left on the floor?  What do you do then?

Don’t let them have it.

If they get it, you go into their mouth after it and use your outdoor mean guy voice to impress upon the dog that you are boss, and you are going to win this particular pissing contest and every pissing contest after that.  Remember that you are the boss.

A smart man learns from his mistakes, a wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

So do pit bulls.

One day when I was practicing “Leave it” with both Faith and Hope, Faith had the audacity to grab the treat off the floor.  I didn’t have them tied to a door or anything.  I had just sat them both down in front of me, demanded eye contact, and dropped a piece of doggy crack on the floor in front of them.

Faith is fast, but not fast enough to escape the clutch of my left hand and the thrust of my right hand into her pie hole fishing for crack while receiving a very loud verbal barrage of “Leave it”.  All the while, Hope just sat there staring at me.  From that point on, Hope never challenged me on a “Leave it”.

I guess she doesn’t want to taste my hand while fishing something out.

As I said before, “Leave it” has plenty of good practical applications for dogs when the training is in place.

As I discovered tonight, the benefits and practical applications transcend species as well.